Waterboarding Was Torture, Until We Did It

Once we started waterboarding, major newspapers stopped referring to it as torture, according to a new study by Harvard’s Kennedy School.

This new study examines how waterboarding has been discussed by America’s four largest newspapers over the past 100 years, and finds that the technique, almost invariably, was unequivocally referred to as “torture” — until the U.S. Government began openly using it and insisting that it was not torture, at which time these newspapers obediently ceased describing it that way:

As Greenwald notes, we have long condemned waterboarding, have prosecuted it, and continue to refer to it as torture when it’s done by other countries.